Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World: n Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, Then a Captain of Several Ships” 

Very Rare 1751 Fifth Edition of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift -Needs Some Restoration

"Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, Then a Captain of Several Ships"

The Fifth Edition, Corrected
London:
Printed for Charles Bathurst, and Sold by T. Woodward, C. Davis, C. Hitch, R. Dodsley and W. Bowles.
MDCCLI (1751)

About the Book:

Full Calf. Condition: Fair and needs some restoration but not that bad. This is the very rare 5th Edition, Corrected, viii, 296 pp., 6 copper plates. Spine and end page are loose. Note about this being a gift written on the inside back cover. Two different owners' book plates on inside front cover and first end page. The blank front end papers are browned at the edge an the second end paper has a small torn piece. Title page printed in red and black and that and all the rest of the pages look pretty clean with very minor foxing.

Interesting background on this book on the web:

Jonathan Swift initially did his best to conceal the fact that he was the author of Gulliver's Travels. John Mullan explores how Swift constructed the work to operate as an elaborate game, parodying travel literature, pretending to be an autobiography and containing obviously false facts presented by a deeply unreliable narrator.
Game playing: A delicious fake
The strange circumstances in which Gulliver's Travels was first published in 1726 tell us a great deal about the kind of book it was designed to be. Its author, Jonathan Swift, arranged for the manuscript of half the book to be dropped off in secret by an intermediary at the house of a publisher, Benjamin Motte. An accompanying letter, signed by Gulliver's supposed cousin Richard Sympson, offered Motte the whole of the Travels in return for £200 (a very large sum at the time). Motte read the manuscript and accepted the offer, paying the money and receiving the rest of the book via the same intermediary. He published it without knowing for sure who had written it.
First edition of Gulliver's Travels, 1726

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Title page of the first edition of Gulliver's Travels printed by Benjamin Motte in 1726.
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Portrait of Jonathan Swift c. 1718

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This portrait of Jonathan Swift was painted by Charles Jervas in around 1718 when Swift was about 41 years old.
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Held by© National Portrait Gallery
The element of game-playing in this was characteristic of Swift. It was not as if he thought he could keep his identity as the author hidden for long. Indeed, there is evidence that he was irked when, at first, some readers attributed Gulliver's Travels to other authors. But it was important to the book's effect that it be a kind of highly elaborate practical joke. It was presented to the 18th-century reader as if it were an authentic travel book. On the title page of the first edition it was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and its author was named as Lemuel Gulliver, 'first a Surgeon, and then a CAPTAIN of several Ships'. It was a kind of delicious fake.
First edition of Gulliver's Travels, 1726

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Fictional portrait of Lemuel Gulliver in the first edition of Gulliver's Travels.
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Swift was 58 years old when Gulliver's Travels appeared, a writer with an established reputation. His new satire was immediately successful, and it was not long before it was confidently attributed to him. (He would officially claim it as his own nearly a decade later by including it in his Works of 1735.) All of Swift's satirical creations were published anonymously or under a pseudonym. Swift absented himself from these works and left his readers – now, as much as in his own day – to puzzle over what to make of his narrators. As we have seen, he went to great lengths to sever Gulliver's Travels from his authorship. He left it behind in England, to be published and to do its mischief, while he travelled back to his home in Dublin.
A Modest Proposal

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A Modest Proposal – Swift's attack on the British government's inability to solve the problem of poverty in Ireland – is one of the literary canon's most famous examples of satire.
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The anonymity of Gulliver's Travels allowed it to be a mock-book. It parodied examples of voyage literature that were popular in the period, and which Swift appears to have enjoyed reading. These accounts were 'true' stories of travels to remote areas of the globe. A New Voyage Round the World (1697) by William Dampier was particularly influential. In the supposed letter to his cousin that serves as a preface to Gulliver's Travels, our narrator mentions advising 'my Cousin Dampier' on the style of his famous work. Dampier's book described a series of voyages, lasting some 12 years and taking him buccaneering around the globe.
First edition of Gulliver's Travels, 1726

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The fictitious lands that Gulliver explores on his voyages were depicted at the fringes of the known world as Europeans understood it: for example, this is a map showing Houyhnhnm Land just off the southern coast of what is now known as Australia.
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Dampier announced that though he brought knowledge of 'Remote Regions', his account was 'this plain piece of mine'. Stylistic plainness guaranteed 'the Truth and Sincerity of my Relation'. 'Choosing to be more particular than might be needful', the narrator has stuck to the facts. At the beginning of the final chapter of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver declares that he has 'not been so studious of Ornament as of Truth' (Part 4, ch. 12). 'I could perhaps, like others, have astonished thee with strange improbable Tales; but I rather chose to relate plain Matter of Fact in the simplest Manner and Style; because my principal Design was to inform, and not to amuse thee' (Part 4, ch. 12). He echoes the proud plainness of his 'cousin' Dampier: 'As to my Stile, it cannot be expected, that a Seaman should affect Politeness; for were I able to do it, yet I think I should be little sollicitous about it, in a work of this Nature'.